


You Are My Sunshine

by captainoutoftime



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, just the sads, no other things, read for cries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-07 07:57:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3167372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainoutoftime/pseuds/captainoutoftime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A final song, to leave him with something beautiful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

You Are My Sunshine  
Steve doesn’t register what it is, only that it’s aimed at Bucky. He has no time to yell, no time to wait for his shield to return, no time for thought. Only action. Instant action without the slightest millisecond of a pause, the kind born only of instinct, of reflex.

He dives on top of Bucky, tackles him from behind, and then all he feels is relief. For just a moment, relief, because he can feel Bucky’s heart beating under his hand. Just a moment, and then his over-flooded nerves begin to drown him in a shockingly cold agony. His breaths come in startled pants- shallow, frightened.

"Steve, what the-?"

Steve can’t reply. He can taste bits of dirt from Bucky’s uniform. Blood too, that metallic taste he was quite familiar with. Something else that tasted like pennies. Adrenaline, maybe. He can taste but he can hardly breathe around the pain that has his eyes wide, wide open.

Bucky rolls Steve off of his back, turns to berate him for doing something so goddamn stupid- didn’t he know he coulda died pulling some jackass move like he was some kinda-

Under dark hair, blue eyes widen hugely. “No! Steve, Steve!” Bucky’s voice is high, panicky, and his hands are shaking- both of them. “Medical! ASAP, Cap’s down. Now! Come, now!” Steve didn’t know that could happen. He blinks slowly, watching the light glint off the trembling metal arm as Bucky examines the hole above Steve’s hip- five inches in diameter and clear through his body. It’s a miracle it didn’t go right through Bucky too- must have missed him by an inch.

"Steve, what were you doing, you stupid punk, you idiot, what did you do?"

The stupid punk smiles a little, though there’s no color in his face at all, and it’s clear that he’s struggling to remain conscious, to spend what will obviously be his last moments with Bucky.

"Buck," he manages to choke out. "Bucky."

He’s crying. Hot tears are racing down his face like they’ve got somewhere urgent to be, flooding down his cheeks, leaving trails in the dust that covers them both. “Steve, no, no. Why’d you- Steve why’d you- you idiot, you idiot,” he sobs, pulling the larger man into his arms, holding him tightly.

"You are my sunshine," he murmurs in answer, the only explanation he could give for Bucky’s refrain of ‘why, why’. "My only sunshine." It’s hard, when he can hardly breathe, to make anything sound remotely like music, but god, does he try. For Bucky. To give him one last beautiful thing.

Bucky is shaking his head, silently begging him not to go. “No, Steve don’t,” he pleads. “Steve, please, please. I need you, I need you.” He touches his forehead to the other’s before adding in a whisper: “I love you.”

Steve’s weary, weary smile is getting harder to hold in place, but he can, for Bucky. He’s cold. He’s so cold. He can’t feel his legs but everything else feels cold. Cold used to mean illness. It meant asthma attacks and more chances to die. And then it meant death-but-not-really. After the plane crash he’d never been able to stand the cold. He wants to ask Bucky to please cuddle him like he does when Steve’s had a bad dream. He doesn’t. “You make me happy…when skies are…gray.”

He can hardly feel Bucky’s hand, gently caressing the back of his neck, or what he assumes are tears, dripping onto his cheeks. He can hardly feel Bucky kissing his forehead, but he does feel it. Just enough. Steve doesn’t taste metal anymore. Mostly, he just hears Bucky’s voice. Not exact words, just the tone that belonged to Bucky and Bucky alone. His vision is blurring. Darkness laps at the edges like a menacing ocean, with a tide that threatens to come in, and fast. “You’ll never know dear, how much I love you.”

Bucky rocks him gently, trying not to scream. This can’t be happening, it can’t, it can’t, it can’t be happening because he would just die if it did. He wants to die now. He’d rather be dead. He’d die for Steve, why couldn’t he have just died for Steve? “I know, Steve, I know how much,” he mumbles, voice thick with emotion. “I love you too. I love you. Please don’t go. Don’t leave me.”

He watches as Steve’s eyes hollow out, vibrancy being sucked away. “Please don’t take…my- sunshine...a...”

There are three strangled breaths, three desperate attempts to cling to life. And then the sunshine is gone, and winter stormclouds reign.


	2. You'll Never Know, Dear

Steve is floating somewhere soft that feels like arms, one harder than the other, but still comfortable and safe. Everything is blissfully quiet. Dark, but pleasantly so. It feels like how he’s always imagined outer space. Modern science informed him that the moon was in fact, an attainable visit, that space is cold and dark and silent and frightening. But he’d always imagined it warm, and velvety, with tiny cool spots for stars, like wet pebbles on sun-warmed sand.

Bucky had always liked the beach. There was no sunshine in space. Not here, anyway.

The thought is enough to jolt him from the dreamy sensations and make him realize that maybe he is approaching a black hole- a vacuum sucking him away for good. He can’t go there. Because if there’s no sunshine…there’s no…there’s something else missing too. What else is sunshine but not? What else? What?

Bucky.

A single name, but it holds enough power to make him panic. Bucky. He has to get back to Bucky. He needs to get back to Bucky. Back to his sunshine. Bucky. The velvet becomes the enemy, tightening around him like bedsheets when he tossed and turned in nightmares- but he fights. If nothing else, he was good at that.

Back down to Earth, down, down, through layers that get colder and harsher and more painful, but brighter too- Steve tries to think only about the light.

And like a switch, there is more light than he can handle, cold fluorescent lights- none of the buttery sunshine he so loves. More than light, there is agony. So animalistic is the screaming he hears that it takes him a moment to recognize it as his own. He wants to be in space again, he wants not to feel like there was a metal spider scurrying around in his body and not to feel like he’d fallen on a set of kitchen knives. Ripping and ripping, tearing at him like teeth.

He can’t stop screaming any more than the planets can simply stop spinning, but he can hear snippets of noise around the roar in his ears, around the pained howling.

"-heart rate, he won’t-"  
“Of course it’s high, would you-“  
“-calm, if a sedative-“  
“-he’ll die if you don’t.”

He’s drifting too far away to make sense of any of it, a balloon just barely tethered to Earth, yearning for the sky with every gust of wind. Steve doesn’t want to fight anymore. He doesn’t remember why he’d left the lovely velvet to begin with. Pain is a deadly force of obliteration, reminds him of the machine they’d used to mindwipe-

Bucky.

Faces in front of him and lights in his eyes and such excruciating pain and it’s so hard to think but he has to stay because Bucky needs him and he has to stay because he needs Bucky’s touch and his smile and those moments when he laughs, eyes crinkling up.

Another sense begins to register. A hand on his arm. Not ripping. Not cutting. Holding. So gently. And there is a voice, and it’s Bucky’s- a voice he knows well, and it’s rough. Quiet, but audible over the screaming he still can’t stop. “Steve. Steve, shh. I’m here, I’m here.”

Both Bucky’s hands wrap around one of his, one metal, one flesh, both strong, both safe. “It’s okay, Stevie. I’m here, you’re okay. You gotta pull through for me, punk. Ain’t the end of the line yet, Steve, come on.” 

Steve finds the strength to tighten his grip on Bucky’s as blackness wraps itself around him like a blanket. It’s a different kind of darkness, though, like the beaten old quilt they’d draped over the couch in that old apartment. No velvet- all rough, all real.

He wakes to soft singing from an emotion-thickened, exhaustion-weakened voice. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…” Fingers card through his hair, soothing and familiar in their rhythm. Warmth, too. Soft blankets under his hands.

"You make me happy, when skies are gray." Steve cracks his eyes open slowly, finding a puffy-eyed, dark-circled Bucky, scruffy and unkempt. Still in the shirt he wore under his uniform, like he’d never left. He swallows, trying to come up with the capacity to speak, to get Bucky’s attention as the dark haired man continues to sing. "You’ll never know dear, how much-"

"I love you." It's a cracked, rough sound, but Bucky smiles like the sun bursting through clouds, and Steve remembers how wonderful it is to be warm.


End file.
